Mississippi’s education system could see significant changes with long-lasting effects on students, including the loss of federal funding and classroom censorship, if the next administration adopts Project 2025’s proposed education policies.
Close allies of Donald Trump drafted the plan, though the Republican nominee has publicly distanced himself from the proposal since it drew controversy. Still, Project 2025 aligns closely with many of his own proposals.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project that outlines sweeping changes to the federal government. The recommendations touch nearly every aspect of the executive branch including executive departments, policies and personnel. In education specifically, the plan supports less federal intervention including the abolishment of the U.S. Department of Education and more support for “school choice” policies like private school vouchers.
Project 2025’s proposals include eliminating Title I funding, which helps high-poverty school districts like those in some of Mississippi’s poorest counties. “In its place, states will receive no-strings-attached block grants with zero regulations or oversight,” the National Education Association notes.
Project 2025 also calls to eliminate the Head Start program, which has provided free early childhood education to 40 million children since its inception in 1965.
Censoring Books and Voices
One of the plan’s major education focuses is censorship. Project 2025’s proposals would censor academic curricula, impose book bans and restrict educators’ voices. In the foreword for the “Mandate for Leadership,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes “the noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.”
“These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women,” he writes.
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical race theory as an “intellectual movement” that examines race as, not a biological reality, but “a socially constructed category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color.” Even though it is not taught in schools, conservatives in recent years have used the term as a catch-all for education about race, including teaching about the nation’s true history of slavery, segregation and systemic racism. At the same time, Republicans, including in states like Mississippi, have focused on limiting the rights of transgender teens and adults.
For Mississippi students, Project 2025’s proposals could spell drastic changes in curriculum freedom and censorship.
Project 2025 proposes expanding book-banning efforts in schools, making it a federal priority and criminalizing librarians who allow students to choose banned books. Research has shown that most book bans seek to eliminate books focused on oppression and important historical contexts, such as slavery, racism or white supremacy. Other banned books touch on issues of race, sexuality and gender. Efforts to ban books in Mississippi have often focused on these topics, including an attempt at a library in Ridgeland, Miss., and successful book bans in the Marion County library.
The American Library Association reported that the highest number of challenged books in 2023 dealt with U.S. History. Project 2025’s proposals could place books about transgender issues in the category of child abuse and pornography, deeming them offensive.
American Civil Liberties Union-Mississippi LGBTQ Justice Project Staff Attorney McKenna Raney said that censorship issues regularly crop up in Mississippi public libraries and public schools, with those arguments generally referring to complaints about a small subset of the available books.
“They tend to have things in common,” Raney told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 2. “LGBTQ authors write them or they have LGBTQ themes of gender or sexuality, or they are about race, racism, anti-racism, systemic discrimination and/or have Black or authors of color.”
Book bans tend to be a blanket solution applied to individual concerns or complaints. Raney says that the book bans proposed by Project 2025 eliminate parental choice.
“Many parents will say to their kids, ‘I’m okay with you reading anything in the historical fiction section, but I don’t approve of these authors, and I don’t want you to bring them home,’” Raney said. “Instead of taking one of those options, the parents are saying, ‘Not only am I entitled to decide what my child what media my child can read and interact with, but I am entitled to make that decision for the whole of my community (or) for the whole of my school.’”
Project 2025 does not outline specifically how book bans could be extended, which Raney said would determine the long-term effect.
“If they were saying, ‘We’re revoking funding if you add these kinds of books,’ or there is a funding bump (to) refuse to add these kinds of books. (There are) any other number of efforts you could use as a federal government to incentivize book banning… The way that they would try and influence that would depend on what the impact of the repercussions are.”
The plan also seeks to strip educator autonomy from curriculum decisions. Project 2025 proposes a federal Parent’s Bill of Rights which could include things such as allowing parents to review and make copies of the curriculum of their child’s school; inspecting the books and other reading materials in the library of their child’s school; and obtaining parental consent before changing a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns or preferred name on school forms, along with other sex-based accommodations for parents. Project 2025 also explicitly proposes censorship of LGBTQ+ topics in schools and eliminating lessons on critical race theory, along with lessons about certain historical events. The National Education Association says this will dismantle education.
The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Communications Manager Ellen Keenan refused requests for an interview and directed the Mississippi Free Press to visit the group’s website for information.
Harris vs Trump on School Curriculum
Amid political controversy over the plan, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has disavowed any connection to Project 2025—even though his own former administration officials, longtime allies and some who hope to be in a future Trump administration drafted it.
Before the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 and it became a lightning rod for controversy, Trump said during an April 2022 speech to the Heritage Foundation that the organization was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
While he has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, Trump’s own campaign platform also supports education censorship. The former president has called to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and pledges to “cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, an outspoken critic of Project 2025, has long voiced opposition to bans or restrictions on books about LGBTQ+ experiences and opposition to laws restricting what teachers can discuss in the classroom
“Check out the book bans–how many of them are against either an LGBTQ+ author or have subject matter that is about LGBTQ+ subjects and people?” Harris said during her 2023 Fight Our Freedoms tour in Arizona. “(It is an) attempt to take us backward in a way that is also meant to marginalize people and make them feel small and to judge people and the hate that it is fueling.”
Read more coverage of Project 2025 here.
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